Maharishi U: Learning to Levitate in Fairfield, Iowa
Tabak, Lawrence
MAHARISHI U LEARNING TO LEVITATE IN FAIRFIELD, IOWA LAWRENCE TABAK "Wherever you meet Transcendental Meditators, you meet Jews." I am silting in the Iowa City TM Center, listening to one of the...
...In New Jersey, attempts to teach TM in the public schools were squelched by a court decision declaring such teaching a violation of the separation of church and state...
...Many MIU students mentioned learning of TM in conversations at a "shul-in" or NFTY retreat...
...Like most male students on campus, Adam adheres to the suggestion in the student guide that "jacket and tie are highly recommended at all times...
...While all available evidence suggests that the Maharishi himself is gentle, benign and altruistic, he also presides over an avid, large and well-funded organization which believes that he is enlightened and incapable of error...
...His followers believe that he is on the way to establishing a system that will cure the ills of the world, and that, of course, is the beginning of fanaticism...
...TM centers, like the one I paid a fruitless visit to in Iowa City, are found in almost every city...
...So you're interested in the Invincibility to Israel Program...
...So the Maharishi began teaching the TM technique, introducing it to the Western world in 1960...
...Chassidic masters," Schacter points out, "say that if there is a particular vice one wants to break, then there are sentences to be said for that before going to sleep...
...Diamond has personally found that running gives a person a similar chance "to really go down deep inside himself...
...TM is a scientific discovery, a technique, which happens to come from India...
...The very same giggly, bearded, and berobed Maharishi who became the hit of the talk shows—and the participating florists...
...The TM Book, a popular promotional package, puts it this way...
...Many would agree with University of Iowa Professor of Eastern Studies Robert Baird, who includes TM in his course, "Asian Religions in the United States...
...Rabbi Jim Diamond is the Hillel Director at Washington University in St...
...A typical subdued service using a conventional prayer book...
...And this implies the power of the Maharishi himself...
...When the Maharishi speaks, TMers react like actors in an E. F. Hutton commercial...
...Intellectual servitude, endorsement of cure-all elixirs for the evils of the world, preoccupation with self rather than with society—a prescription, in short, for danger...
...SCI is the first course a student takes before beginning the traditional subjects...
...He has published in American-Jewish Times, Outlook and Cincinnati Magazine...
...If a person has been practicing TM with great benefits and then comes to me as a rabbi and asks if he should continue, I would say not to drop it...
...I ask a few more questions, but the answers are so hedged that I soon give up...
...Agni, the first word of the Rig Veda, expresses the wholeness of knowledge...
...Outside, a small sukkah had been constructed...
...I'm not a meditator...
...The Sh'ma is chanted like a mantra...
...Every nation will rise to invincibility...
...It's absurd to assume that just because TM comes from India it must be some Hindu practice...
...The initiator bows down before the portrait of Guru Dev, offering the cloth, fruit, and flowers to "the lotus feet of Shri Guru Dev...
...And the Maharishi was bequeathed a mission by Guru Dev: teach the world a simple form of meditation...
...By 1975, scientific studies allying the benefits of TM had created a meditating boom, and the Maharishi purchased the bankrupt and deserted campus of Parsons College in Fairfield, Iowa...
...If you look at a good Jewish prayer book, you will find we have a plethora of mantras to be said before going to bed...
...education will be ideal...
...With a Machiavellian touch the Maharishi explains why changes in rhetoric are necessary: "If the enlightened man wants to bless one who is ignorant he should meet him on the level of his ignorance," he writes in his commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita...
...The most popular posters are not of Farrah or by Escher but portraits of Maharishi...
...Estimates of the percentage of Jewish students among the 700 undergraduates range from one-fourth to one-third...
...It has nothing to do with religion except as the easiest technique I have yet discovered for making religion become more alive...
...Few people," Rabbi Schacter says, "have ever seen energetic mantric prayer...
...If you put it in the total perspective, it is quite clearly and implicitly metaphysical...
...Write that we need someone," they asked, "someone who could understand the Jewish students here at MIU...
...It was at first surprising, later annoying, to hear almost identical explanations from the various people with whom I spoke, all in tones of patient condescension...
...The stadium is deserted and overgrown with weeds...
...Adam seemed a little embarrassed by the small number and added, "Remember that the cost of the trip is $2,500...
...In coal mines they use a canary to test out the air...
...All it takes is twenty minutes of silent meditation, once in the morning and once at night, using a special Sanskrit mantra...
...By flying they mean self-levitation, meditating themselves off the ground...
...That is not any longer a technique: that is a cult...
...In an early book he called TM a powerful form of prayer, and for some time called the highest level of consciousness "God consciousness...
...Quickly he slips the paper he has found back into the stack...
...Lately the Maharishi has refrained from the printed word in favor of videotape, perhaps because tapes are more easily controlled and less likely to leave haunting echoes...
...It's simply a technique," David says...
...Students who have passed this course can repeat the lessons verbatim...
...And Debbie is clearly within the acceptable boundaries of "coordinated outfits for ladies...
...The MIU library has more seats for viewing videotapes than for reading...
...Adam and David have both completed the course and both tell me that they now "fly...
...Earlier in the day, I had toured a lab...
...Six of the seven founding faculty members were Jewish, and three of the college's current top four administrators are Jewish...
...And the percentage increases among those who have been in the movement longer...
...But I don't like the TM form of meditation for myself or as a preference for those I love and know...
...Our real goal is to develop enlightened Jews...
...with the surprise and disappointment of a missionary confronted with another stubborn lost soul...
...The campus, full of new if cheap buildings, sat idle until MIU moved in...
...The student population at MIU is cosmopolitan—and heavily Jewish...
...But while they seem self-assured and in control, I sensed that the control was not internally derived, was not a result of personal decisions, but rather came from the strength of the Maharishi...
...About four years ago, following a trip to Iowa City, Diamond took a side trip to visit MIU and to talk to a group of Jewish students, expecting ten to fifteen...
...This prompted the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (an umbrella group whose members include, among others, the Anti-Defamation League, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, and United Synagogue of America) to pronounce in their 1978-79 program that "we are opposed to TM practices in public schools and recommend, if and when deemed appropriate by the Joint Advisory Committee, Jewish community relations agencies join with other groups in contesting such practices...
...Sidhis are special or unusual powers, such as invisibility...
...A year ago the college experimented with flying (the conventional kind of flying) a Chassidic rabbi to campus from the Minneapolis area in order to conduct classes on Judaism...
...that he, and he alone, can teach so as to give access to special gifts and knowledge...
...Arthur Wascow, the Jewish radical author, offers the explanation that "Jews are alert to new ways of thought and possibilities...
...One student made a revealing comment when he explained that learning to be a TM teacher was as intense as going through medical or law school...
...An official TM publication describes the Age: "Society will soon be characterized by harmony and happiness...
...health will be perfect...
...Later he asked to meet off-campus...
...Debbie, two other Jewish students (David and Adam), and I begin a walk into the remarkably warm October night to talk about TM and Judaism...
...On the opposite side of the issue is Rabbi Raphael Levine of Seattle's Temple DeHirsch Sinai, whose position is preserved on two videotapes at the MIU library and in TM publicity booklets...
...What are we to make of all this...
...In defense, the Maharishi has gradually weeded out the religious rhetoric and replaced it with scientific language...
...You really have to come to a Chassidic service in Brooklyn or Jerusalem...
...After the Guyana tragedy, no one can be insensitive to the dangers of such claims...
...Robert Rabinoff, a physics professor on the MIU faculty, is one of the people who personally attests to this effect...
...Maharishi's proposal would send up to 1,000 American Jews to Israel for a special TM-Sidhi program...
...After all, it only takes one percent of the population...
...In one of the earliest forms of Jewish mysticism, dating as far back as the second century B.C.E., the subject would sit with his head between his knees and whisper hymns, songs, and repetitions of magical names...
...His picture is everywhere: in classrooms, administrative offices, bulletin boards, as ubiquitous as the crucifixes in a Catholic grade school...
...Meditation itself may well provide important personal benefits, and these may translate into important social benefits as well...
...He is smiling, a staring smile thai reflects the vulnerable openness of so many meditators...
...We really do need someone," Debbie said...
...I am silting in the Iowa City TM Center, listening to one of the stall" members...
...I was not surprised to hear David eagerly say, "Vedic study is the study of complete knowledge...
...Rabbi Schacter has written disparagingly of the "rationalism" that "has infected most of modern Judaism...
...The Maharishi has over 1,000 hours of videotaped lessons at the MIU library, but most of these are not available to the public...
...But "Flunk-Out-U," without accreditation and without the bolstering fear of the draft, went bankrupt...
...All subjects at MIU are studied "in light of the Science of Creative Intelligence...
...When he endorsed TM, Diamond describes the crowd as "going bananas, having a bona fide rabbi telling them they were still part of the fold...
...I ask...
...The course presents the Vedas, the ancient Hindu scriptures, in a manner similar to the teaching of Bible by a fundamentalist Bible school...
...Or are they a collection of very confused young—and not so young—people...
...But what am I thinking," Debbie says, staring into the sky...
...She also learned to meditate...
...Debbie is in her second month of studies at MIU...
...After receiving a degree in physics, he met and began to study under Swami Brahmanada Saraswati, known to TMers as Guru Dev...
...one of the two lab assistants became deeply involved in giving me a tedious TM lecture...
...But surely the entire approach—especially the dependence on one master teacher and the suspension of critical judgment—are at odds, and radically so, with the Jewish way...
...I short-circuited him by jumping six pages and quoting from lesson seven, and then returned to the possible conflict between TM and Judaism...
...The gentleness and charm of the MIU students cannot be gainsaid...
...So, by rote, it is given back...
...Services had been held in a converted lounge in one of the small dorms that had been a Parsons innovation...
...TM is not a religion," Adam says...
...My life was crude, and religion is infinitely subtle...
...Translations of some of the Sanskrit mantras reveal terms that have been traditionally used in reverence of Hindu deities...
...Air fare was no longer provided...
...Rabbi Abulafia in the thirteenth century developed a mystical system of contemplating the Hebrew letters YHVH...
...There's a great deal of beauty and validity to the practice, and I have no question about the benefits...
...The Hindu related religious aspects of TM don't bother Schacter, who is currently a faculty member of Temple University...
...MIU is a quiet college nestled among the cornfields of central...
...On the walls are graphs showing all the good things science has demonstrated TM can do, a large portrait of a bearded guru with the legend, "His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi," and a long colorful poster showing a smiling young woman sitting in midair...
...It may be that nothing the Maharishi preaches is explicitly at odds with the teachings of Judaism...
...There will be peace in the family of nations...
...Levine states that, "the TM program is not a religion...
...but visitors may sense the intellectual numbness that massive meditations promote...
...I was just nominally Jewish before I began meditating...
...At first he had met with the students on campus, after demanding that the pictures of the Maharishi be covered...
...Mantras are words or phrases that are repeated over and over in the meditator's mind until he "comes into direct contact with the source of thought...
...She lived with an Orthodox family in Jerusalem ("they were role models for the entire community") who had obviously captured her affection and admiration...
...I attempt a translucent meditator's smile and shrug my shoulders, hoping for a touch of inscrutability...
...TM undermines the ethical system of Judaism," he says, calling the initiation ceremony "absolute idol worship...
...TM does not oppose purposeful activity...
...Rabinoff does his twenty minutes of meditations every morning and then davens, using t'fillin he inherited from his uncle...
...The students who haven't taken the TM-Sidhi course all seem anxious to...
...I tested this during our walk with David and Adam by asking about the Vedas...
...And when the students work with ancient Hindu Vedas, they are not invited to peruse the multitude of commentaries that exists: the true meaning is offered them, via cassettes, by the Maharishi himself...
...The effect of the 1,000 fiercely meditating students is expected to strengthen Israel and increase the chances for peace...
...Are these really the "finest, most sensitive and spiritual persons of our age...
...Well, the Jews are the canaries of society...
...At MIU flying is Considered as common as getting high might be at another school...
...But there is only one Maharishi International University...
...Fraternity letters painted on a railroad overpass, spray-paint taunts from a former football rival on the old brick entrance, the names of buildings, and an overly large police force are just about all that remain of the rowdy Parsons days...
...As we read in unison from Psalm 97 at the beginning of the service, the thought of all the portraits, and all the emphasis on the image and words of the Maharishi, made me a little uncomfortable...
...inspired by this progress Maharishi, in 1975, declared the Dawn of the Age of Enlightenment...
...Seeing her friends drift off to college and away from Judaism prompted her to spend a year in Israel exploring her "Jewish roots" and Orthodox Judaism in a yeshiva...
...One of the first things I noticed on arriving at MIU that Friday was a sign on the Student Union door: "Meeting with Lenny Goldman for Non-Flying Jewish Students who want to go to Israel at 3:30 in the chapel today...
...After dinner, which followed erev Shabbat services, leaving the cafeteria into the night, 1 am asked to share this city girl's—Debbie's—sighs...
...Rabbi Schlomo Carlebach's House of Love and Prayer in San Francisco is one of the few places where Jewish forms of meditation are taught...
...Inside was a Torah, one of the few prized legacies of Parsons...
...In the dormitories where David and Adam live, there are specially padded "flying rooms...
...The initiator recites a Sanskrit verse which pays homage to the long line of men who have preserved the ancient mantric knowledge and which is especially profuse in praise of Guru Dev, Maharishi's immediate teacher...
...He begins sifting through a slack of papers on his desk and asks, "How long have you been meditating...
...Everyone lives on campus...
...To follow the Maharishi is to know that the solution to any problem, from headaches to cancer, from the oppression of Soviet Jews to starvation in Africa, can be found (perhaps can be found only) through the practice of TM, through learning to meditate more effectively (advanced courses at advanced prices), through convincing others to meditate...
...Where I in fact first heard about the program was on the campus of the Maharishi International University, where I had been visiting just a few days before, when, as it turned out...
...Students are proud of what is called the "holistic approach" to education at MIU...
...Lawrence Tabak is a freelance writer and tennis pro in Ames, Iowa...
...After a while, I interrupted and asked that his partner finish the speech, which, after a momentary shock, he did, earnestly completing the canned text...
...The words are given by a trained initiator to people who have attended two lectures and paid the fee (now $200, $150 for students...
...He is the same Maharishi who gained fame in the sixties from the allegiance of celebrities like Mia Farrow and the Beatles...
...Nowhere are to be heard the usual sounds of the university: the blaring stereos in dormitory halls, raucous laughter in the cafeterias, the echo of football cheers on a Saturday afternoon...
...Vedic study is the study of complete knowledge...
...At the end of each course students are asked to rate their teachers on "successful integration of the Science of Creative Intelligence" (score 0-3...
...Even the trained scientists devote their research to scoring points for TM...
...I managed to catch him in his office in the science wing, where almost all research activity centers on the effects of TM...
...The Maharishi is asking for Jewish students because he feels the influence of meditation is strongest among those closest by blood...
...The mantra, selected to fit the vibrational needs of the individual from a list purported to have about sixteen possibilities, is then revealed...
...Like all official representatives of the TM movement, he is conservatively groomed and dressed in suit and lie...
...The synagogue was one of the few campus rooms missing a portrait of the Maharishi...
...An embroidered Hebrew "shalom" hangs on the wall...
...All of the 1,000 members of the campus community practice TM, even the janitors...
...It was only natural that as I began meditating and my mind became clearer, I found meaning in my own Jewishness...
...Many rabbis and Jewish leaders blame the large migration of Jewish youth to religious cults and Eastern spiritualism on the quality of modern Judaism...
...TM publicists would disagree, but I am now convinced that one can get the same benefits with other types of practices...
...What was that...
...The Maharishi asked us to read a statement to interested meditators...
...Port-man was initiated to the TM method (rabbis and ministers must have special permission from the Maharishi), and took about a third of the Science of Creative Intelligence course before rebelling...
...I am a visitor interested in the disproportionate percentage of Jews in the TM movement and on the MIU campus...
...The Maharishi welcomes all faiths to the practices of TM, and so many of his followers carry along their Judaism as they study the ways of Vedic knowledge, as they carry on the Maharishi's way to the Age of Enlightenment...
...In other times Jewish seekers might have been more inclined to stay within Judaism...
...But only by chance running into anyone who can help them find a spiritual use for their burden...
...Classrooms are fronted with TVs placed on white sheets and flanked with flowers in preparation for the Maharishi's video image...
...Nature will be balanced—all seasons will come on time, crops will be abundant...
...Everything comes from something," he says...
...He looks up...
...On his desk are portraits of his wife and two photos of the Maharishi...
...Maharishi—a title meaning sage or wise one—was born Mahesh Prasad Varma in 1918 in central India...
...Zalman Schacter has written that "the greatest problem is the fact that once the spiritual process is initiated in the Jewish seeker, in order to integrate the experience into his life, he finds no place where he might do this with other Jews...
...Where would we be if we started worrying about which of our Jewish customs came from the Canaanites...
...A travel poster on the wall read, "This year in Jerusalem...
...it merely suggests that the most effective mode of behavior is to practice and proselytize TM...
...More graphs for the world's TM centers...
...I nod and smile back...
...May 1 anyway...
...TM ties it all together...
...No, I'm afraid not...
...The problem is that TM in a sense keeps you spiritually stupid...
...The Maharishi says," David countered, "that as subtler and subtler states of consciousness are reached, more and more people will naturally return to their faiths...
...The TM program prepares the ground for this fullness of knowledge...
...But if the person comes first, then already I have a problem...
...MIU students get the Sidhis for a cut rate $1,500...
...And many do carry with them their Judaism as they follow the Maharishi around the world, even carrying their t'fillin, yarmulkes, and tallesim...
...Confounded be all that serves graven images," we read, "and takes pride in things of naught...
...I have announced my interest in a new program to send Jewish meditators to Israel...
...Remarkably the same response, in very similar words, that I had heard from other meditators...
...Anyone who has meditated for more than six months can get the course for $3,000...
...If this person knows enough to ask a rabbi, then we already have to go and talk differently...
...Oh, no," Debbie says...
...I glanced around, but seemed alone in my discomfort...
...All this and more, promises the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi...
...Toward the end of our walk that evening Debbie, David and Adam stopped to make a final plea...
...And it is only natural that the practitioners of TM feel that the benefits they have gained should be spread among their friends...
...I think about fifteen," Adam said...
...The Hillel Director at the University of Iowa, Rabbi Jeff Port-man, was asked by the National Hillel Foundation to make a recommendation on the support of the Jewish community at MIU...
...The dormitory halls are lined with shoes, like the entrance to a Japanese temple...
...These days such references are gone...
...In high school she wrote a column for the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle...
...You're used to this...
...The report cited TM's Hindu foundation and the religious overtones of the initiation ceremony, aspects which fundamentalist Christian groups have been attacking for years...
...As I leave, curiosity prompts the staffer to a last question...
...She wishes that someday she can return and teach them TM so that they might then teach others to "use their full potential...
...More than once I was gently informed that "initiators" are now being called "teachers...
...Just where did you hear of the Invincibility to Israel Program anyway...
...the first word of the Israel program was announced...
...And what of the compatibility of TM and Judaism...
...Parsons College had been a sleepy school with a few hundred students until a new president, George Millard Roberts, hyped and promoted the school to a cramped 5,000...
...The TM movement, promoting a product so neatly and attractively packaged that Adam Smith has called it "the McDonalds of the meditating business," has initiated over one million Americans...
...A small portable altar was set in front...
...They are gentle and winning people, no question about that...
...Again and again the importance of TM is reiterated...
...I think about the twenty students who had gathered for the Friday evening service at MIU...
...It merely asserts what it does about levitation and invisibility, and no one I met or spoke with is aware of the irony that such assertions are accepted unskeptically in an institution that claims an "emphasis on creative intelligence...
...When I asked if he had to know the material well, he replied, "Almost by heart...
...A technique that has been scientifically shown to reduce stress, increase performance...
...Gershom Scholem in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism describes Abulafia's teachings as "a Judaized version of that ancient spiritual technique which has found its classical expression in the practices of the Indian mystics who follow the system known as Yoga...
...Like many of the courses at MIU, SCI is taught through a series of video cassettes recorded by the Maharishi...
...Instead a packed hall of 250 was awaiting the arrival of "the meditating rabbi...
...But so well-packaged a commercial for the way to a perfect life, all governed by the smiling Maharishi...
...Research at MIU has attempted to demonstrate that in cities where one percent or more of the population meditates, crime, accident fatalities and emergency room admissions are reduced...
...He should not tell him about the level of the realized, because it would only confuse him...
...On his final visit a few administrators sat in on his session and were alarmed with his suggestions that for Jews, there is only one path...
...So one of the first questions I ask Debbie, David, and Adam as we walk a darkened sidewalk on the heavily wooded older part of campus is if they feel TM has assumed any aspects of a religion for them...
...SCI is an allegedly scientific study of the physical and mental phenomena produced by TM...
...His recommendation to Hillel: stay away from MIU...
...Louis, and uses the TM technique, although less and less frequently...
...If we reject these Jews, we reject the finest, most sensitive, and spiritual persons of our age...
...As Debbie, David, Adam, and I walk past the old Parsons chapel, where the students had met that afternoon, I ask how many people had signed up...
...Rabbi Diamond suggests that Jewish life is organized around Jewish policy and Israel, and not around "the hungers of the heart and spirit...
...The university forms the northern edge of Fairfield, a town of 8,000...
...The author wishes to express his appreciation to Rabbi Robert Tabak for his assistance in the preparation of this article...
...Zalman Schacter, a rabbi and mystic with a deep interest in Jewish spirituality and an excellent rapport with leaders of Eastern forms of religion, neither condemns nor supports TM: "I am for meditation and for what it does," Schacter explains...
...An icebreaker as common among meditators as "and where are you from...
...The Jewish students, feeling very close to the rabbi, attempted, as one student put it, "to explain some of the more subtle aspects of TM, things that are difficult for a nonmeditator to understand...
...Initiates must also bring a handkerchief, fruit, and flowers which are used in the ceremony...
...This has been labeled the Maharishi Effect...
...Understand or not, the rabbi grew less tolerant of TM...
...The campus through which we walk, surrounded by cornfields and a town old-fashioned enough to fill the town square on Memorial Day with an American flag for every native war casualty, is hardly your average college campus...
...Selection is allegedly related to the initiate's birthday...
...A mantra doesn't engage your values, your philosophical selves, your higher motivations...
...Rabinoff scoffed at the idea that TM might include elements that are contrary to Judaism, but others are less sure...
...A "classified" handout from an advanced course, "Fundamentals of Vedic Study" labeled "Draft Copy, Do Not Duplicate" shows the Maharishi's method...
...All this from sitting in bed twenty minutes in the morning and twenty minutes at night, repeating a Sanskrit word to yourself, over and over...
...So the Jews in the TM movement follow the path of the Maharishi, as clearly laid before them as the yellow brick road...
...On a fall day, the hum of harvesters in the adjacent cornfields is the loudest sound: at night the skies are so clear, the stars so dense, that it is enough to make a city girl sigh...
...For the beginner," he says, "it may be a method of relaxation, but once a person gets into the deeper aspects it should be considered a religion...
...Nor does TM discourage critical judgment...
...Further, TMers believe that the Maharishi is the fountainhead of ancient knowledge...
Vol. 4 • January 1979 • No. 3
